The video clip omits the most important part of Vonnegut's lecture. He does Hamlet and it's a flat line. It's odd because this is the point of the article yet the clip omits it.
This is even explained in the article. It is the "infographic" which entirely misrepresent his point.
The title of the article is also rather misleading. It makes is sound like he thinks there is exactly 8 possible shapes, while he is just showing some examples.
Ah good point - we've de-eighted the title now. This is an obvious (except I missed it) application of the site guideline:
If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
Note that at the same time he refutes his earlier part about the stories of primitive people (as he put it) who had stories that were completely flat ( https://youtu.be/4_RUgnC1lm8?t=2470 ).
> We won't know the answer to this challenge for a very long time.
This is essentially the "halting problem", or the "principle of computational irreducibility", or whatever equivalent formulation you want to pick. We'll never know the answer -- for most computations there are no shortcuts to predict their outcomes.
Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors, but this idea (which was not accepted for his Master's thesis, iirc) was extremely limited and laughable in terms of literary theory even when he suggested it. 20th century structuralism (esp. literary semiotics) was leaps ahead even then, with the likes of Greimas, Barthes and Eco.
Seeing how Vonnegut referenced leading scholars (e.g. McLuhan) in his works, he should have known better. It is weird that he still felt that this limited approach was worthwhile.
I'm not sure he did, at least not in terms of serious, academic, literery theory but you can perhaps see how it might be a useful heuristic for an author in terms of thinking about what type of story they want ot write. Vonnegut was always throwing half baked ideas into the public realm just to see where they'd land and that's a large part of his appeal for me (c.f. the stories of Kilgore Trout).
This shapes of stories thing that resurfaces every so often is kind of perfect for internet amplification, it's easy to grasp there's the potential for some nice pictures and Vonnegut is always engaging as a both speaker and a writer. I'd read his essay on the topic in the 90s because I'm a Vonnegut completist but at the time I don't think it was considered anything other than a minor flight of fancy. It's kind of a shame that things like this and DFWs "this is watter" speech which are kind of easily graspable tend ot eclipse the more interesting stuff. Though maybe it's a gateway.
It is definitely not supposed to be taken at face value. He explicitly mentions that Hamlet cannot be graphed like this - it is too ambiguous whether the events are "good fortune" or "ill fortune". He concludes that "Shakespeare was a poor storyteller".
His actual point is that we don't know enough to tell whether events are actually good or ill fortune, and therefore stories like Cinderella (or the Bible) does not reflect the ambiguities of real life.
> He concludes that "Shakespeare was a poor storyteller".
He certainly does not, or, if he says those words, he's being deliberately facetious.
He says: “I have in fact told you why this is respected as a masterpiece. We are so seldom told the truth. In Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and what the bad news is, and we respond to that. Thank you, Bill.”
This is a sign that you may not have outsmarted him, he may have outsmarted you. Of course, that's a communication failure on his part, but when you're speaking to a large audience the failure to communicate your idea is measured as a percentage of the audience, not a boolean.
I thought the same. Sloppy editing. If you watch the included video, the graph that Vonnegut draws for Cinderella starts below the B/E axis, not above like the New Testament.
I saw this on github - a machine learning model that is trained to tell fairy tales. I think Vonnegut would have liked this, these are kind of similar to the machines from Tralfamadore. Well, Trurl and Klapaucius from the Cyberiad were also machines. I wonder if these ML models will ever be up to this level of storytelling...
I'm looking forward to reading this in depth, but first: there have been many attempts to describe the 25, or 7, or 2 types of stories. My favorite, only because I can remember is, is 2:
1. A man goes on a journey
2. A stranger comes to town
Do all stories reduce to one of those? Not really, but it's interesting.
"Not really, but it's interesting." is my reaction to most of those. If you're trying to write fiction, they might help. If you're watching a TV show, you might see that the scriptwriter is slavishly following one of those, as @legohead says below.
I've heard it broken down into those two before. It's an interesting take, but one that I don't think aptly describes the "two stories". My own take on "there are two types of stories" is:
1. Something must change
2. Change needs to be prevented
Just about every story boils down to one of those concepts, and how the characters respond to the needed/pending change.
I highly recommend his work. It is all uniquely entertaining, most books consumable in a day or two, and some of which I find oddly terrifying (Cat's Cradle) sometimes on an existential level (Sirens of Titan). Though always always a fantastic read.
Similar to his theory, I've noticed that for there to be a great achievement by the protagonist, there has to be a great suffering first. Once I noticed this pattern, it has ruined a lot of shows for me. I can't sympathize with characters, because I know this is just part of the formula and they will soon be achieving greatness.
Suffering through and overcoming challenges on the way to victory/triumph/transformation is as old as the earliest myths, and is often called "The Hero's Journey": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
Blockbuster movies were ruined for me when I read "Save the cat". I then went on to ruin them for others by recommending the book :-)
In all honesty though, the most enjoyment I get from large-budget movies now is the visual effects. The plot is basically the same shape: all 21 of the Marvel movies have the same basic shape, and that is because that shape sells really well.
This is Ebert's "Law of Economy of Characters" - "Movie budgets make it impossible for any film to contain unnecessary characters. Therefore, all characters in a movie are necessary to the story—even those who do not seem to be."
In particular if it's a serialized piece, like episodic television, and you meet "an old friend" of a major protagonist character (or in Star Trek a commissioned officer on the finitely-staffed ship) they've never mentioned before, the new character often literally exists to be a source of adversity and loss for the major character.
I think it (and the 8 shapes concept) can rather deepen awareness of the complexity of storytelling by giving us a roadmap to recognize and appreciate the nuances of a skilled execution (how did the teller hide the features of the trope? How did they misdirect us? How did they approach the features in a new way?).
Emotional responses to art are predicated on expectations either met or contradicted; more understanding of the structures of a medium leads to more active expectation (especially thanks to the generation of a common language with the artist) which can provide more gratifying depth of emotional response.
A good/bad axis over time doesn't really tell you anything new about the story that you don't already know, and the only information contained in the "shape" is how many times the good/bad axis is crossed (I don't see how Cinderella is more 'step shaped' than 'boy meets girl' stories). Crossing this good/bad axis already has a better concept to describe it while also encapsulating more complex story events: the plot point.
The idea is completely useless in stories with any ambiguity (most good stories), or absurdist, or anti-hero (like Taxi Driver), or conflicting narratives, or where time isn't uni-directional (such as recollections like Citizen Kane) etc.
For those who haven't watched the video, his whole talk is tongue-in-cheek. The flavor of the talk is the same as the flavor of his writing; both worthwhile.
I was going to post that folklore framework. I love initiatives to formally catalogue and index everyday, organic, non-quantitative things like stories. Does anyone know of similar efforts in any other fields?
There's also the late Blake Snyder's Save The Cat tenfold classification scheme for screenplays, which can be useful at least for ameliorating a bad movie watching experience by leading to debates over which one of the ten categories you just saw.
On the other hand, if you know his categories, it can take away from the enjoyment of films; once you know you're watching a movie of a specific category, it's easy to anticipate the rest of the plot.
Cinderella's story arc doesn't look the same to me. She is told from the start that she has until 12 to enjoy herself. When the spell wears off, she doesn't complain or even feel very sad; she just relishes the experience she's gone through. She's also never in any real danger, except for being locked in her room. Her stepmother also causes the glass slipper to break, but she still had the other to prove she was at the ball.
I'm just going to throw this out there, that until recently, we didn't necessarily have the computational tools to plot these stories algorithmically, as Vonnegut suggests doing. However, with modern language models, we surely do so at this moment.
Not that I have the time to take on more projects, but it must be reasonably easy to, say, do a sentiment analysis of the synopses of books and movies, say from IMBD, and generate these curves. I think it would be interesting to do a kind of type analysis on how many unique structures there really are.
A friend did this for a school project! It was super cool - Harry potter was cool because the later books took on different shapes, which to me showed one of the reasons such a simple set of stories got so popular (Book 1 is Cinderella; Book 5 is Kafka; Book 7 is "Man in a Hole", etc.).
But ultimately, on real data, what it boiled down to is "there are only so many general shapes you can plot in 2D." It apparently became a very manual visualization process: the normalization problems (book length, length of good/bad bits, etc.) from different texts swamped any new shapes one could conceivably identify using the method.
Man in Hole. The main character gets into trouble but winds up being better from the experience.
This is kind of like the plot of Cars where Lightening has to fix the road of a small town he wrecks. Car in Hole. I personally think I'm better from the experience because I'll be avoiding watching those movies with my kids in the future...
'Stranger Things', 'Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels', 'The Usual Suspects', 'Pulp Fiction'... all immediately come to mind as man-in-hole stories.
Reductive/deconstructive literary criticism helps highlight novel elements of the subject story. I can't fathom being upset about it, but then again, I didn't watch 'Cars'. Maybe it is a particularly bad movie?
I love stories and movies that are kind of just like "man a bunch of shit just happened, is there really a lesson? who knows" (like Burn After Reading for a comedic example).
There doesn't have to be a "point" for there to be beauty or something to learn from people and their lives and experiences, fictional or not.
The idea is appealing but there is this underlying hypothesis that things that happen to the main chracter can be qualified as true or bad. I wonder what the shape of a detective story would be for instance.
In many detective stories, the detective is not the main character. They are the point-of-view, but act more like a force of nature passing through the story unchanged while someone else is going through a complex character arc while witnessing the unfolding of the story.
I would argue every story has a vast, seemingly infinite* number of shapes, limited only by our ability to model objectives toward which events can be classified as positive or negative. Still, that doesn't make it a useless method of analysis because we can find objectives that can be applied across stories in a somewhat universal way. Or, authors can simply come up with objectives that they think might be interesting.
*I suppose these numbers would be combinatorically constrained by a function of the number of graphemes/phonemes, and not actually infinite, but still huge.
See this one, for example (near the end):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_RUgnC1lm8
Vonnegut concludes:
"We don't know enough in life to know what the good news is and the bad news is."
Cinderella and the rest are fantasy. Hamlet is the truth. Life is ambiguous and stories that tell us otherwise are lying to us.
This story graph thing has been quoted out of context so many times that people have completely forgotten the point Vonnegut was trying to make.